Uncovering this Appalling Truth Behind the Alabama Correctional Facility Abuses

When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely bans journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That thwarted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly ended prison visit, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the directors looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. But several imprisoned observers told Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

The state benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in goods and work to the state each year for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents deemed unsuitable for the community, make $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in October 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not just one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything